Rusty Gill remembers the days when Nashville’s top country performers used to have to come north to the distinctly non-countryfied environs of the Loop in the hope of broadening their fame.
“Chicago had it all in those days when it came to country music–Nashville wasn’t up to speed yet. Even stars like Rex Griffin would show up, trying to get a couple of minutes on one of our shows,” says Gill, 80.
Gill was a regular on what was then the biggest country radio show in the nation: the National Barn Dance on WLS, which from 1924 to 1960 blasted its 50,000-watt clear channel signal across the Midwest and Great Plains every Saturday night, first from the Sherman Hotel and then from the 8th Street Theatre on the Loop’s southern edge (now the site of the Conrad Hilton International Ballroom).
“We were able to fly anywhere and get an audience because of WLS,” says the guitarist, who worked primarily with Barn Dance regulars the Prairie Ramblers, a four-piece string band founded by Kentuckians Jack Taylor and Chick Hurt.
Like many Southerners in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, members of the Prairie Ramblers migrated to the industrial north in search of work. Gill’s family moved to Chicago from downstate Marion for similar reasons, and after developing his talents as a solo act — including a stint at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1933 — Gill was asked to join the Ramblers.
He went from doing $7.50-a-day promotional tours for the Barn Dance as a solo act to playing everywhere “from California to Florida with the Prairie Ramblers, all because of WLS,” he says. “We’d draw 1,000 to 15,000 people anywhere we went; we packed ’em in at state fairs — so many you couldn’t see ’em all from the stage.”
Chicago’s country scene was so vibrant it was big enough to support two tiers of performers: those who regularly performed on the Barn Dance, entertaining tourists in sit-down theaters, and those who frequented the hard-drinking honky tonks along Madison Street. The sound of fiddles, mandolins and pedal-steel guitars provided the backdrop for nights of drinking, dancing and, in many cases, brawling.
“What we played wasn’t country music–we called it `hillbilly,’ ” says Johnny Pitts, an Alabama native who arrived in Chicago in 1956 at the age of 21 to hone his guitar-playing skills on the club scene.
One of his first jobs was at a Madison Street joint, the Memory Ranch, that exploded in gunfire and fisticuffs one night. “It was a family feud between rival bar owners, and I remember being on the bandstand when a gang from the bar across the street came through the doors firing their guns at the ceiling and into the floor,” Pitts says. “One of the bullets ricocheted and broke the neck off my guitar.”
Three of the kings of the latter-day Chicago honky-tonk scene were the Sundowners, who held court at the Bar Double R in the Loop, first at 56 W. Madison St. and later at 56 W. Randolph St. With their inventive harmonies, encyclopedic songbook (reworking everything from Appalachian classics to Tin Pan Alley tunes for city slickers) and natty Western stage gear, the group not only attracted admirers like Lefty Frizzel and Webb Pierce to their shows, they helped turn on a younger generation of musicians to country’s charms in the ’60s through the ’80s.
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“I thought they’d be cheesy cabaret the first I went to see them in the ’80s, but they were fantastic,” says Jon Langford, a Welsh punk rocker who now lives in Chicago and stands as one of the leading lights of its alternative country movement. “They invited us up to play, as they did just about anyone who had an instrument, and we tried to do stuff like (Hank Williams’) `Lost Highway’ and `Green Green Grass of Home.’ We were horrible, but they carried us through — the guitar player, Don Walls, never left the stage. They had been doing this music for 30 years, and they were like a living reflection of American folk culture.”
The Barn Dance self-consciously set out to romanticize that culture when it originated in April 1924 as a means of selling merchandise to Midwestern farmers by WLS owners Sears and Roebuck. The programming was distinctly nostalgic, referencing a simpler, bucolic past that was a fast-fading memory for many listeners. Corny jokes were told, cow bells were rung after each performance, and national stars were made, among them Gene Autry, George Gobel, Lulu Belle and Scotty (Wiseman), Pat Buttram, Rex Allen, Red Foley and Patsy Montana.
At its height, the show was receiving a million pieces of mail a year from listeners and was filling the 1,260-seat 8th Street Theatre for its two weekly broadcasts. The annual WLS Family Album and weekly Stand By magazines were issued to fulfill fans’ desires to learn more about performers. In 1939, the Coon Creek Girls, an Appalachian quartet discovered by the Barn Dance, played the White House for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the king and queen of England. In 1949, Rex Allen — whose yodeling, harmony-rich story songs are well documented on “The Last of the Great Singing Cowboys,” a recent compilation of unreleased radio transcriptions on the Chicago-based Soundies label –was pulling in $150,000 a year as one of the Barn Dance’s biggest stars and went on to an even more lucrative acting career in Hollywood.
“Chicago was beautiful to me,” the late singer recalls in the liner notes to the Soundies release. “I could do
no wrong.”
For many country performers, the story was the same for several decades. But the Barn Dance’s success spawned many imitators, and one of them–Nasvhille’s “WSM Barn Dance,” later known as the “Grand Ole Opry”–eventually overtook it. By the early ’50s, the Barn Dance had given up competing with the Opry, skewing more toward variety entertainers and pop performers while the Nashville giant was showcasing Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb.
Even the Prairie Ramblers had to swap country two-steps for a faster polka beat to stay in demand. “We switched in 1955,” says Gill. “We augmented the band with drums and trumpet, and put an accordion player up front. Country is in my blood, but times changed.”
Says Pitts: “Rock ‘n’ roll came along, and the scene started to break up.”
In 1960, WLS switched to a rock format, and WGN picked up the Barn Dance for another desultory decade, but it wasn’t the same.
Yet, Chicago’s country scene never completely disappeared, thanks to true believers such as the Sundowners. The trio–Bob Boyd, Curt Delaney and Don Walls–later helped open a new era of Chicago country music, appearing on the first release by the Bloodshot label, the 1994 compilation “For a Life of Sin: A Compilation of Insurgent Chicago Country.” The group took its place alongside such contemporary performers as Robbie Fulks, Freakwater and the Handsome Family, a symbolic passing of the country torch from one generation to the next. Boyd, before his death in December, also appeared on a Bob Wills tribute album assembled by one of Langford’s groups, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts.
“People say we started the alternative country thing in Chicago, but I don’t think that’s true,” says Langford. “I think there have always been bands in Chicago playing interesting country music, as opposed to what is now pretty boring Nashville country. I think it’s more a case of some people coming to Chicago and being shocked by what was already here and trying to build on it. It’s a fascinating history.”